The thing is...you get pretty good VR devices that won't make you puke every 10 minutes for 399 to 899 soon. Most game engines these days are also free to use and support VR decently well. Basically what I'm banking on is setting this setup free to any interested enthusiast will lead to things we can't even imagine now. I'm hoping the useful stuff will be built by a 16 year old with a random VR headset for their game console hacking around in Unity and not some academic. It also helps that said 16 year old can share whatever they built with more people and get a better feedback loop. I think cool stuff is more likely to be built if at least one person in your immediate group of friends can actually use it.

[interaction and content are huge hurdles imo, the more people work on it the better]